Liberating the literature

Category

analytics

Trip is involved in the extremely interesting KConnect project, via the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding stream. One output of this has been a nice interface to explore our clickstream data. Clickstream data being a record of how people interact with the site eg search terms used, articles viewed etc.

This gives us a glimpse of clinical uncertainties, ‘hot topics’, useful sites etc. Below are three images to highlight potential uses, but we know there are more. Imagination is the limitation with this data!

Image One – this is a record of searches for breast cancer and a drug. So, which drugs are most popular when used in conjunction with the term breast cancer? In this case, it’s trastuzumab!

Image Two – As we record the date and time of the search we can plot search term popularity. So, you can clearly see a peak of searching for ebola around October last year.

Image Three – for searches which publications have been most visited? Top is PubMed, followed by NHS CRD, then NICE. http://dx.doi&#8230;. refers to Cochrane and the final entry to the top five is CADTH.

Earlier today in the post Article analytics I said “This latest feature will be released soon.” Little did I realise it would be live by the end of the day!

In the above image I’ve highlighted four key areas:

Analytics – appears under every link (for Premium users only), this is clicked to generate the data below.

Related by viewer – these are articles that have been clicked on during the same search session as they had clicked on the main article (Canadian clinical practice guidelines for the management of anxiety, posttraumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorders).

Viewers by country – this highlights where the users originate from who did the clicking!

Viewers by profession – as above but broken down by profession

NOTE: the above example is very rich as it’s clearly a very popular article. Others will have considerably less data, another reason why we’re keen to get users to login!

This latest feature will be released soon. For a given article premium users will be able to see related articles (based on clickstream data) as well as information on total views, views by country and views by profession…

We are in the process of switching to a new email system and this is causing problems! If you’re requesting things such as password renewal your email is in a queue of 28,776 and the rate of sending is 1,006 per hour! So, another 24+ hours till we’ve got through those.

Prior to the new system we used an in-house email tool we built from scratch. It worked really well for 7+ years but has recently started to creak at the seams. So, we’ve upgraded to a paid system called Mandrill.

The problem is that when you’re new it doesn’t allow rapid sending of emails as it ‘senses’ your reputation. It looks at things such as number of rejected emails (for instance). The one thing we have are a load of dormant accounts and currently we’ve got a bounce rate of 20% – so 20% of emails are bouncing back as being undelivered. This doesn’t help our reputation, which is ‘poor’ – hence being restricted to 1,006 per hour.

The good news is – and Mandrill is great for this – is that it allows us to easily auto-delete these dormant account so next time our reputation will be much higher and therefore we should have a much higher send rate.

That aside Mandrill does all sorts of things which should allow us to create a much better email experience and also it gives us analytics showing how many emails were opened, how many links were clicked etc. Fascinating reading.